Of course, it's the settlers' fault

By Nadav Shragai

"Every day there's a funeral," wrote the poet Uri Zvi Greenberg 
in 1936, "death without pause has already become a habit among 
the people - and I," the poet continued, "hear those who say: 
'We will know how to defend ...' every day they say this, four 
long months of killing.".Sixty-four years later, we are at the 
threshold of another bloody era, "considering," "deliberating" 
and "viewing with seriousness," and like Greenberg said then, 
"walking in cities and in villages, like mice ..."

Ehud Barak, too, is familiar with "Every Day There's a Funeral" 
by U.Z. Greenberg. Two weeks ago Shlomo Filber, a resident of 
the settlement of Psagot (and the director-general of the Yesha 
Council of Jewish Settlements) visited the prime minister's 
office and handed him a copy of the poem. Barak, slightly 
embarrassed, was quick to initiate a learned discussion about 
the poem. And so, the prime minister of Israel and 
representatives of the Jews who are being shot at every day in 
Judea and Samaria sat together and pored over the old text: 
"Four months have passed and Arab guns still hunt Jewish 
rabbits, male and female."

Residents of the Katif bloc who met with Barak at Be'er Sheva's 
Soroka Medical Center also spoke with him about history. They 
reminded him that when the poet was writing "Every Day There's 
a Funeral," a Jewish citrus grower named Tuvia Miller was 
battling Arab rioters who sought to uproot him from the 
swampland he had purchased in Dir al Balah that eventually 
became Kfar Darom. Miller was forced to leave, but in 1946 the 
pioneers returned, and they returned once again in 1970 
(by decision of the government of former Prime Minister Golda 
Meir) and again in 1989 (by decision of the Shimon Peres-Yitzhak 
Shamir unity government).

The Yesha Council leaders have a different sort of dialogue 
with the army. Barak insists that the hands of the Israel 
Defense Forces are not tied, but on Wednesday they heard from 
Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz that the security cabinet had 
rejected his 10-point plan.

The events of these days, which are so difficult for the 
residents of Judea and Samaria, have also been merciful to 
them, as proven by the long list of thanks read out by the 
presenters at last week's mass rally at Jerusalem's Zion Square. 
Artists, guesthouses, holiday villages, kibbutzim and moshavim 
from the Galilee to the Negev, supporters as well as political 
rivals who understood that in wartime political disagreements 
must be put aside and hands extended to their brethren. Senior 
army reserve officers come to the Jordan Valley to provide armed 
escort to the Jewish transportation there, while Upper Galilee 
residents who found temporary refuge and calm in the Binyamin 
region are now inviting inhabitants of Judea and Samaria to take 
a vacation in their communities.

But the events also exposed elements in Israeli society whose 
hearts have forgotten the old Jewish rule that all Jews are 
responsible for each other. They are the priests of the new 
religion - the people who speak of peace at any price, even if 
the price is the complete opposite of peace. They immediately 
found the guilty party - the settlers. Calls are already being 
heard, as they were with regard to Lebanon, on the lines of 
"what are our soldiers dying for" and "what are the settlers 
doing there anyway." The Palestinians can infer from this that 
the blood of some Jews is worth more than that of other Jews.

The account that some of the left is settling with the residents 
of Judea and Samaria is not only not political, it is also 
one-sided. The accounts ledger they keep against the settlers is 
missing the line containing the irresponsible decisions made by 
Israeli governments in recent years which endangered the lives 
of Israeli civilians and soldiers. The Oslo Accords, which 
[the late Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin called a calculated risk, 
turned out to be a wild gamble.

Hundreds of "victims of the peace" were stabbed, shot or killed 
on buses as a direct or indirect result of handing over territory 
in Judea and Samaria to the Palestinians and turning those areas 
into places of refuge and hotbeds of terror. In the name of peace 
and in the spirit of Oslo, terrorists with blood on their hands 
were freed, despite it being proven time and time again that many 
of them go back to killing and murdering. (The Intifada in which 
more than 200 Jews and more than 600 Palestinians were killed was 
also born in the school of the members of Ahmed Jibril's Popular 
Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command who were 
released in a prisoner exchange with the organization.)

Since Rosh Hashanah, Palestinians have been shooting and sometimes 
killing Israeli soldiers and civilians in Psagot and in Hadera, 
in Kfar Darom and in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market, and it is 
impossible to ignore the fact that at least some of the arms in 
their possession were supplied to them by the architects of Oslo, 
"in the name of peace."

But instead of casting their eyes to the ground in shame, asking 
for forgiveness and telling the public what they promised to say 
seven years ago if their experiment failed - we tried, we made 
a mistake - some of the Oslo people have the insolence to point 
to the real cause of the problem: the settlers